【弗朗兹·博普】
Franz Bopp (September 14, 1791, Mainz – October 23, 1867, Berlin ) was a German linguist known for extensive comparative work on Indo-European languages .He was born at Mainz , but owing to the political disarray of the time, his parents moved to Aschaffenburg in Bavaria . There, he received a liberal education at the Lyceum, and Karl J. Windischmann drew his attention to the languages and literature of the East (Windischmann, along with Georg Friedrich Creuzer , Johann Joseph von G?rres , and the brothers Schlegel, expressed great enthusiasm for Indian wisdom and philosophy). Moreover, Friedrich Schlegel 's book, ?ber die Sprache und Weisheit der Indier ( On the Speech and Wisdom of the Indians , Heidelberg, 1808), which had just begun to exert a powerful influence on the minds of German philosophers and historians, could not fail to stimulate also Bopp's interest in the sacred language of the Hindus .
In 1812, he went to Paris at the expense of the Bavarian government, with a view to devoting himself vigorously to the study of Sanskrit . There he enjoyed the society of such eminent men as Antoine-Léonard de Chézy , Silvestre de Sacy , Louis Mathieu Langlès , and, above all, of Alexander Hamilton (1762–1824) [not the US statesman], who had acquired, when in India , an acquaintance with Sanskrit, and had brought out, along with Langlès, a descriptive catalogue of the Sanskrit manuscripts of the Imperial library. In the library, Bopp had access not only to the rich collection of Sanskrit manuscripts (mostly brought from India by Jean Fran?ois Pons in the early 18th century) but also to the Sanskrit books which had up to that time been issued from the Calcutta and Serampore presses.The first paper from his four years' study in Paris appeared in Frankfurt am Main in 1816, under the title of ?ber das Conjugationssystem der Sanskritsprache in Vergleichung mit jenem der griechischen, lateinischen, persischen und germanischen Sprache ( On the Conjugation System of Sanskrit in comparison with that of Greek, Latin, Persian and Germanic ) (Windischmann contributed a preface). In this first book Bopp entered at once the path on which he would focus the philological researches of his whole subsequent life. He did not need to prove the common parentage of Sanskrit with Persian , Greek , Latin and German , for previous scholars had long established that; but he aimed to trace the common origin of those languages' grammatical forms, of their inflections from composition – a task which no predecessor had attempted. By a historical analysis of those forms, as applied to the verb, he furnished the first trustworthy materials for a history of the languages compared.
【约瑟夫·戈宾诺伯爵】
Joseph Arthur Comte de Gobineau (14 July 1816 – 13 October 1882) was a French aristocrat, novelist and man of letters who became famous for developing the theory of the Aryan master race in his book An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races[1] (1853–1855). De Gobineau is credited as being the father of modern racial demography, and his works are today considered very early examples of scientific racism.
Gobineau's father was a government official and staunch royalist, and his mother, Anne-Louise Magdeleine de Gercy, was the daughter of a royal tax official. He was not, however, a nobleman, having added the 'count' to his name himself.
In the later years of the July Monarchy, Gobineau made his living writing serialized fiction (romans-feuilletons) and contributing to reactionary periodicals. He struck up a friendship and had voluminous correspondence with Alexis de Tocqueville,who brought him into the foreign ministry while he was foreign minister during the Second Republic.
Gobineau was a successful diplomat for the Second French Empire. Initially he was posted to Persia, before working in Brazil and other countries.
He came to believe that race created culture, arguing that distinctions between the three races - "black", "white", and "yellow" - were natural barriers, and that "race-mixing" breaks those barriers and leads to chaos. He classified Southern Europe, Eastern Europe, the Middle East, Central Asia, and North Africa as racially mixed.
Gobineau also questioned the belief that the black and yellow races belong to the same human family as the white race and share a common ancestor. Trained neither as a theologian nor a naturalist and writing before the popular spread of evolutionary theory, Gobineau took the Bible to be a true telling of human history and accepted in An Essay on the Inequality of the Human Races the day's prevailing Christian doctrine that all human beings shared the common ancestors Adam and Eve (monogenism as opposed to polygenism). Nonetheless, he suggested that but for the Church's teaching there was nothing else to suggest that the coloured races were foreborn, like the white race, from Adam, since "... nothing proves that at the first redaction of the Adamite genealogies the colored races were considered as forming part of the species".
Gobineau believed the white race was superior to the other races in the creation of civilized culture and maintaining ordered government. However, he also thought that the development of civilization in other periods was different from in his own and speculated that other races might have superior qualities in those civilization periods than in his own. Nonetheless, he believed European civilization represented the best of what remained of ancient civilizations and held the most superior attributes capable for continued survival. His primary thesis in regards to this theory was that European civilizational flowering from Greece to Rome and Germanic to contemporary sprang from, and corresponded to, the ancient Indo-European culture, also known as "Aryan" which included for example the Celts, Slavs and the Germans.
However, Gobineau later came to use and reserve the term Aryan only for the "German race" and described the Aryans as 'la race germanique'. By doing so he presented a racist theory in which Aryans—that is Germans—were all that was positive Gobineau originally wrote that, given the past trajectory of civilization in Europe, white race miscegenation was inevitable and would result in growing chaos. He attributed much of the economic turmoil in France to pollution of races. Later on in his life, with the spread of British and American civilization and the growth of Germany, he altered his opinion to believe that the white race could be saved.
Paradoxically, although Gobineau saw hope in the expansion of European power, he did not support the creation of commercial empires with their attendant multicultural milieu, concluding that the development of empires was ultimately destructive to the "superior races" that created them, since they led to the mixing of distinct races. Instead, he saw the later period of the 19th century imperialism as a degenerative process in European civilization. To support his conclusion, he continually referred to past empires in Europe and their attendant movement of non-white peoples into European homelands in explaining the ethnography of the nations of Europe.
According to his theories, the mixed populations of Spain, most of France and Italy, most of Southern Germany, most of Switzerland and Austria, and parts of Britain derived from the historical development of the Roman, Greek, and Ottoman Empires which had opened up Europe to the non-Aryan peoples of Africa and the Mediterranean cultures. Also according to him, southern and western Iran, southern Spain and Italy consisted of a degenerative race arising from miscegenation, and the whole of north India consisted of a yellow race.
Hitler and Nazism borrowed much of Gobineau's ideology, though Gobineau himself was not antisemitic, and may even be characterised as philosemitic.Gobineau wrote positively about the Jews, including the long eulogy to them in his Essai sur l'inégalité des races, describing them as "a free, strong, and intelligent people" who succeeded despite the natural disadvantages of the Land of Israel. When the Nazis adopted Gobineau's theories, they were forced to edit his work extensively to make it conform to their views, much as they did in the case of Nietzsche.
Though in no way espousing his beliefs, Bahá'ís know Gobineau as the person who obtained the only complete manuscript of the early history of the Bábí religious movement of Persia, written by Hajji Mirz? J?n of Kashan, who was put to death by the Persian authorities in c.1852. The manuscript now is in the Bibliothèque Nationale at Paris. He is also known to students of Babism for having written the first and most influential account of the movement, displaying a fairly accurate knowledge of its history in Religions et philosophies dans l'Asie centrale. An addendum to that work is a bad translation of the Bab's Bayan al-'Arabi, the first Babi text to be translated into a European language.
Gobineau wrote novels in addition to his works on race, notably Les Pléiades (1874). His study La Renaissance (1877) also was admired in his day. Both of these works strongly expressed his reactionary aristocratic politics, and his hatred of democratic mass culture.